Welcome back. It's the new and improved iBrattleboro.com
Things have changed a bit, but it should be pretty easy to get used to. We've moved the site to a new server, updated the software, and made some cosmetic and layout changes that might take a little getting used to, and they may change further still. Let us know what you think after using it for a while.
You may want to delete your cache and delete any of your iBrattleboro.com cookies, then re-login.
There are some new experimental features you might like to know about. We might need to tweak or remove some if they are abused or break, but we'll give it a try and see how we do.
More Stories On the Home Page
We've increased the number of stories on the home page, so things will stay there just a bit longer.
Weather
Weather is back. Lise did rituals (well, it was really programming) to get rid of broken links and images. Welcome back, weather.
FCKEditor
We were going to announce the implementation of a new FCKeditor. It is a WYSIWYG text editor named after Frederico Caldeira Knabben (not a naughty abbrieviation of something else) and will help you do some simple formatting for your posts. Unfortunately, everyone using Safari would have a miserable time on the site, and it isn't worth it to us to make nearly 20% of iBrattleboro users into second class netizens. Keep watching news about the FCKeditor, and if it works with Safari (or Safari begins to work with it) we'll turn this feature on.
RSS
An RSS feed is a way to get headlines and stories sent to another device using Really Simple Syndication (RSS).
You can get an RSS feed from iBrattleboro at feed://http://ibrattleboro.com/backend/geeklog.rss
Trackbacks
It's a modern, now-a-gogo way of inter-site communication. Lots of blogs use it. I've never found a good use, but we're turning it on to see if others find it handy. Pings, too. Its all a way for people to keep track of comments made on other sites. It also may lead to spam, in which case we'll turn it off.
Search
The search engine is improved. First of all, it works again. Text you are searching for is now highlighted in most browsers.
Passwords
The "forgot my password' feature has been fixed.
Donations
We've added a way for people to help support the site with 1 year subscriptions, billed monthly. The standard donation methods are still in effect, too, for those with occasional windfalls they like to donate to community media.
Images
You want to add images. We want you to get breaking news photos up quickly.
Got a Brattleboro-related image posted at flickr.com? You can now add it to your stories all by yourself. Just write it like this in the form of an "autotag":
bracket flickr colon photoid endbracket. Like this: [flickr:photoid]
What is a photo id? When you view a photo on flickr, the URL looks something like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/blah/188846471/
Here "188846471" is the photo id. Add that id in the [flickr:] autotag after the colon:
When the story is displayed, it will show the photo's thumbnail instead of the autotag. Clicking on the thumbnail will take you to the photo page on flickr (the above URL, in this example).
The plugin will get the photo's title from flickr and display it as a title attribute when you hover your mouse over the thumbnail. You can also add a "size:medium" tag after the photoid and before the name to get a bigger image. The default is the tiny thumbnail, which people with modems do appreciate. You can provide your own title, simply enter it after the id and a space:
The above is written in code like this: bracket flickr colon photoid size colon medium imagerollovertitle endbracket..
Please use common, community-oriented sense in posting local photos in stories.
Videos
You want more, though, right? Got a video on YouTube that relates to the story you are covering? You can now use a YouTube video in your story submissions.
YouTube gives you code to link to your videos. Just copy and paste it in and you'll be able to, for example, show Helen Thomas at the Media Giraffe conference.
Or if you want to be fancy, paste the embeding information from YouTube in your story (as html) and you'll get something fun like this: